‘Institutionalized inequality in India has its cultural and economic coordinates’. Discuss. (1991)
Inequality in India is institutionalised in the strict sense: it is not an outcome of individual failure but a durable arrangement reproduced by rules, beliefs and property relations. The proposition is that it is fixed by two coordinates — a cultural axis of ritual rank and a material axis of ownership. The argument holds, provided we show that the two are not parallel lines but a single mechanism.
The cultural coordinate
- Louis Dumont, in Homo Hierarchicus (1966), made the opposition of purity and pollution the generating principle of caste. Hierarchy is a value, ranking is religious, and status is separated from power: inequality is legitimate because the society believes it.
- G. S. Ghurye, in Caste and Race in India (1932), listed the institutional carriers — segmental division, hierarchy, commensal and marital restriction, occupational restriction and civil disabilities.
- The cultural coordinate is enforced through endogamy, which is why Uma Chakravarti‘s “Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy” (1993) is indispensable: caste purity is preserved by controlling women’s sexuality, so gender is not a third coordinate but the mechanism by which the first reproduces itself.
The economic coordinate
- A. R. Desai and the Marxist tradition read the same order as a property system. Ritual rank codified who owned land, who cultivated it and who supplied unpaid or bonded labour; the jajmani relation was surplus extraction described as reciprocity.
- Daniel Thorner‘s division of the agrarian structure into malik, kisan and mazdur names classes rather than castes, yet the strata were filled largely along caste lines.
- Capital, credentials and networks now carry the same function. Access to elite education, professions and business remains caste-skewed, so market processes reproduce an older distribution without invoking ritual at all.
How the coordinates work together
- André Béteille‘s Sripuram study showed the coordinates once cumulative — the Brahmin was highest in ritual rank, largest in landholding and dominant in the village — and now increasingly dispersed. Dispersal weakens the correspondence without abolishing it.
- His distinction between harmonic and disharmonic systems locates modern India precisely: a constitutional ideology of equality coexisting with a practised hierarchy, so inequality is no longer legitimated yet not dismantled.
- The two coordinates convert into each other. Ritual stigma depresses wages and credit; poverty in turn confirms the stigma. That circuit is why atrocity remains a routine response to Dalit economic assertion: the National Crime Records Bureau recorded 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes and 12,960 against Scheduled Tribes in 2023, the latter almost 29 per cent higher than the previous year.
Which coordinate does more work?
Dumont’s ideology-centred account explains the form of Indian inequality — why it is graded, hereditary and ritually justified — but understates power, as his Indian critics insist. The materialist account explains persistence under capitalism but cannot explain why a wealthy Dalit is still refused a house. The cultural coordinate supplies the classification; the economic coordinate supplies the stakes.
Conclusion
The statement is sound and, if anything, understated. India’s institutionalised inequality is not culture plus economy but a structure in which ritual classification allocates material assets and material assets confirm ritual classification — which is why constitutional equality has proved easier to declare than to deliver.